#braais

At some point, I’m not quite sure when exactly, the summer heat diminished, rain started sprinkling the days and I brought a red coat in Amsterdam.

At some point, I’m not quite sure when exactly, I stopped going out every single day to sightsee, and had to stay inside to work on my Masters thesis.

And at some point, I replaced buying Ladurée macaroons with homemade soup, as my 21-week semester abroad turned into a 10-week countdown, and eating a croissant everyday just wasn't going to happen.

And as always, as with most individuals I know, I am incessantly fascinated with the concept of time. In my moments of elation, there it goes, whooshing past me, so speedily I can practically hear the hands of the clock turning in my ears. And in times of missage or cloudiness, time stares at me, steadfast, watching my every move and making me uncomfortable. Ten weeks in and I’m halfway between having seen all I want to see and being ready to come home – sounds about right when I put it like that.

The motif of being halfway relates to my larger place in life as well. My 5-year stint as a student is swiftly coming to a close, as I submit my Masters thesis in April next year and with that, I will begin an untrodden career path. There should be a Humanities FAM course on how to prepare for the next stage of my life. I don’t even know how to sign a cheque and the thought of paying taxes still scares me. What’s a 401k used for and do I need one? Sometimes I Google the term ‘important adult stuff’, in the hopes they’ll be some guide out there, and I am always disappointed with my results linking me to sites about ‘management skills’ and ‘child care’.  I find comfort in the fact that I am an epic parallel parker. 

It’s not quite a quarter-life crisis – more of a quarter-life awareness that I’m experiencing. There’s this sadness in the reality that friends will part, Jammie stair-days are few and far in-between, and that having no courses on Friday is soon to be a fond memory. Having always been incredibly uneasy with uncertainty, this next era of my life is asking me to come to terms with the unknown.

And back in Paris, the fact that I have 10 weeks to go until returning to my most beloved summer time in South Africa leaves me feeling bewildered. I have the want to shout: “But I still have SO MUCH I WANT TO DO!” (queue the desire to go to the Bibliothèque nationale, to visit the Grand Palais, to see Champagne, and to go sit in a coffee shop and read Being and Nothingness).

Simultaneously, I am coming to accept that this period of my life was always going to be limited, and that returning home will have its own happiness and new adventures. And of course, a part of me has already begun making a list of things I want to do upon my return, naturally including finally trying a Sunrise Roti (the fact I've never had one is abominable, I know), going to Llandudno for the day, smoking a pipe (an aspiration I’ve concocted in my head at some arbitrary point in time) with my good friend Brett and talking life, braaing (I never braai, but I hope the invitations to braais flood my Facebook events), and celebrating New Years in some non-descript coastal village with my friends while drinking too much of everything.

Ultimately, the bitter-sweetness of living abroad is indulgent and oh-so-fleeting. You have to make the most of it, and still be realistic. As our bursaries finally came through, Kristen and I saw few better uses than to book a 9-day trip to Budapest and Prague with some newly made friends from Brazil and Korea - as you do. The need to travel is innately buried in me, and feeding the love for it seemingly only makes me hungrier (haha, yes yes, and so I decided to go to Hungary).

Until my return, I have 10 weeks. And I still have SO much I want to see. I am definitely not ready to come home yet. But I realise that travel, essentially, is just a condensed form of our lives -